Fashion as world-building in the years of post-communist transitionFashion as world-building in the years of post-communist transition
Lecture by Gyula Muskovics
24. 4. at 6 pm
Co-production: Zavod Maska
The talk focuses on the work of Tamás Király (1952-2013), one of Hungary’s most iconic underground artists in the 1980s and 1990s, who combined fashion with playful, iconoclast and gender-bending performances in Budapest in the last years of state socialism. Placing Király’s work in dialogue with avant-garde fashion scenes that illuminated the cultural capitals of the former East, the talk will explore the role of fashion events—from the Avant-Garde Fashion Assembly in Tbilisi to the Untamed Fashion Assembly in Riga—as they shaped forms of world-building around the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, the talk will place Király’s work in dialogue with the experimental drag and theatre scenes of New York City’s East Village in the 1980s and 1990s.
Gyula Muskovics is a Budapest-based curator, writer, artist and cofounder of the Hollow immersive performance art group. From Fall 2023 to Spring 2024 he was a Fulbright fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and New York Univetsity. Gyula’s works and publications are motivated by a pull toward the edge and revolve around subversion, queer desire, intimacy, and the political capabilities of the body. He has performed, created and curated events in off-sites, theaters, galleries, and festivals including Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest, HU), House of Arts (Brno, CZ), MeetFactory (Prague, CZ), radialsystem (Berlin, DE), and Donaufestival (Krems, AT). He is currently a PhD candidate at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. He has given talks at nGbK and Slavs and Tatar’s Pickle Bar in Berlin, the School of Visual Arts in New York and the University of Chicago. His essays and articles have appeared in The European Journal of Women Studies, DIK Fagazine, CTM Magazine and post – MoMA.
Photo credit: Tamás Király and a model wearing a hat resembling the dome of the Hungarian Parliament (with the Parliament in the background), 1989.
Photo: Jonathan Csaba Almási